Is It Nation Time?: Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Editor)

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Black Power movement provided the dominant ideological framework through which many young, poor, and middle-class blacks made sense of their lives and articulated a political vision for their futures. The legacy of the movement is still very much with us today in the various strands of black nationalism that originated from it; we witnessed its power in the 1995 Million Man March, and we see its more ambiguous effects in the persistent antagonisms among former participants in the civil rights coalition. Yet despite the importance of the Black Power movement, very few in-depth, balanced treatments of it exist.

Is It Nation Time? gathers new and classic essays on the Black Power movement and its legacy by renowned thinkers who deal rigorously and unsentimentally with such issues as the commodification of blackness, the piety of cultural recovery, and class tensions within the movement. For anyone who wants to understand the roots of the complex political and cultural desires of contemporary black America, this will be an essential collection.


Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Farah Jasmine Griffin
Phillip Brian Harper
Gerald Horne
Robin D. G. Kelley
Wahneema Lubiano
Adolph Reed Jr.
Jeffrey Stout
Will Walker
S. Craig Watkins
Cornel West
E. Francis White

269 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2002

About the author

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University and author of Democracy in Black.

Reviews

[Kelley · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was in college, I crafted a course about the struggle for Civil Rights. That's where I first learned about the Black Power Movement. I don't remember what made me so intrigued, but I devoured anything I could find on the BPM and, once I'd read Angela Davis, anything I could find on black feminism - which wasn't much since, in those days, you were limited to the library and ILL. Fortunately, the ILL system has always been great wherever I lived.

A couple of years ago, I decided to read every book on black feminism owned by the local libraries. I was curious. In a town where the black population is 60%, to what extent are the library's choices reflective of the demographics. As you can imagine, at the rate I read, this didn't take long. The list of books was fairly short. There were a ton on BPM, though, especially since a lot of memoirs have come out since my infatuation in the early 90s. But BF? There just wasn't that much that I hadn't read already. Surprisingly, though, I did find E. Francis White's book, Dark Continent of Our Bodies, which was an internal critique of the essentializing nationalism and sexism in the BPM. It was rather good. It made me curious: how did *this* book get on their shelves, when there were so many others, such as a slew of bell hooks' book, that are more popular and more well-known, especially as introductions to BF?

Since a friend of mine contributed to this book, and since I totally heart Robin D. G. Kelly's _Race Rebels_, I put this on my to-read list. Finally came in from ILL.

Skimming, it's pretty good so far. Will report more later.